Incarnate

by Ramsey Campbell

  “It doesn’t seem enough to say that Campbell is a master of the horror genre.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “At the core of this horror story is the stuff that dreams are made of … five people with widely different backgrounds and varying degrees of psychic ability are gathered together for an experiment on prophetic dreaming. The story (begins) 11 years later, when the former subjects … find that all their nightmares start to come true … MASTERFUL.”

  —Booklist

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  INCARNATE

  Copyright © 1983 by Ramsey Campbell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Reprinted by arrangement with Macmillan Publishing Company, a division of Macmillan, Inc.

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, 8-10 West 36 Street, New York, N.Y. 10018

  Cover art by Jill Bauman

  First TOR printing: September 1984

  ISBN: 0-812-51650-8 CAN. ED.: 0-812-51651-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  For MATTHEW:

  someday, son, all this

  will be yours

  —with my love

  Among the people I could not have done without are my wife Jenny, for continuity George Walsh, for improving the structure John Owen, for allowing himself to be taken to a Spiritualist meeting.

  Carol Smith, for insights into television Norman Shorrock, for philatelic pointers Christine Ruth, for London locations Dave Drake, for reminding me of Chapel Hill Jim Walker, for cinema backgrounds John Williams, for legal advice John Thompson, for help in post-production.

  … dreams you might have dreamed yourself …”

  —ROBERT ROBINSON, on classic horror fiction

  “I have walked a city’s street where no man else had trod.”

  —ROBERT E. HOWARD, Recompense

  I ask you to think on the hours when one sleeps. Do you know what happens then? The body may lie still in bed, but what happens to the thoughts—the spirit? With what ancient demons does it spend its time? And in what deeds?”

  —ARDEL WRAY AND JOSEPH MISCHEL, Isle of the Dead

  “I am forever dreaming of strange barren landscapes, cliffs, stretches of ocean, and deserted cities with towers and domes… . All this dreaming comes without the stimulus of Cannabis indica. Should I take that drug, who can say what worlds of unreality I might explore? … I have travelled to strange places which are not upon the earth or any known planet. I have been a rider of comets, and a brother to the nebulae… . Surely the strange excrescences of the human fancy are as real—in the sense of real phaenomena—as the commonplace passions, thoughts, and instincts of everday life.”

  —H P. LOVECRAFT, in letters

  (27 September 1919, 21 May 1920)

  Incarnate

  1

  WHEN they let her out of the room at last, she’d forgotten what she had to say. The sky outside the window told her it was evening, the sunset descending a smoldering ladder of clouds above the Oxfordshire hills, and she could hear voices in the corridor. But apart from those details, her mind was blank. Above the clouds the August sky was a deep calm blue, calm as the sleep her whole body ached for. Maybe the voices weren’t in the corridor after all but in the pincushion that her wired head felt like. She had just realized that her speculations had driven what she had to say out of her head when the door opened and Stuart Hay came in.

  Whatever it had been, she didn’t think she would have been able to say it to his round, young, constantly flushed face that always looked incredulous. “Still here then, are you?” he said, scratching his mat of cropped red hair. “Having a lie in?”

  “There isn’t much else I can do, is there?”

  “There is now.” He pulled back the cuffs of the redundant lab coat that he wore like a skeptic’s uniform and began to peel the taped wires off her forehead. “You can meet the others.”

  So she would meet them at last, but just now that was only another distraction, something else to make her forget what she had to remember. “Is it over?” she said.

  “Disappointed?” He had removed the last of the contacts; the patches of her skin where they had been felt moist and cool, as if his fingertips were lingering. “What were you expecting?” he said with a grin that seemed patronizing.

  “What were you? It was your idea.”

  “Dr. Kent’s, not mine.” He was smiling, pleased that she’d been sharp with him. “But no, we haven’t done yet,” he said, bringing her her dressing gown from the hook on the door. “She thought it was time for you all to meet one another.”

  She swung her disused legs out of the sheets that felt untidy and clammy, and wondered if she could stand up. “How long now, do you think?”

  “You’ve only been here five days, you know.”

  “It feels more like twice that,” she said, matching his sharpness. She’d listened to at least that many playbacks of her voice that sometimes sounded as if she had been muttering drunkenly in her sleep. “I can’t even read now, I can’t concentrate with waking up so much.”

  “You could go stir crazy in here, at that,” he admitted, with a glance around the pale green room that was almost clinically bare, but his tone seemed to say that not only had she volunteered, she was being paid as well. She tidied her hair in front of the mirror and gazed at her wide mouth, her bright green eyes, her long blond hair spilling over her shoulders. He took her arm as she limped on her prickling legs toward the door, and that contact let her ask, “Have you found out anything about me?”

  “Too soon to say.” He halted, gripping the doorknob. “Just one thing before you meet the others—please don’t talk about any of your dreams. I don’t need to tell you why.”

  The smell of paint in the corridor caught at her throat, the indirect lighting that trailed down the green walls made her feel half-asleep. She could hear several voices now, in the lounging area at the far end. Though Stuart was leading her slowly toward them while she got used to her legs again, she felt she was going too fast to think. Had she had a dream that she’d forgotten to confide to the microphone over her bed, or was that her exhausted imagination? Had Stuart been in it, or was that her imagination too? The more she tried to grasp it, the less real it seemed, and in any case it was too late now, for they were at the end of the corridor. As she stepped off the linoleum onto the island of green carpet, everyone turned to look.

  She didn’t take in their faces at first. She had let go of Stuart too readily. The carpet seemed to give way under her feet, and she sat quickly on the nearest chair, almost missing. She had a confused impression of a crowd of seated people and large-boned Dr. Kent alone on her feet, the empty socket where a television should have been plugged in, tables bare of newspapers and magazines, smoke streaming jerkily up from an ashtray. But there were only a few people, one of whom came over and sat next to her. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Molly. I’m Joyce.”

  She was a small woman in her forties, gray eyes bright as steel in her square face behind her pale blue spectacles, whose case was clipped into the breast pocket of her candy-striped summer dress. She snatched off the spectacles as if that would help her get closer to Molly. “I’ll introduce you. Freda, Helen, Danny. Stuart and Guilda you know, of course.”

  Guilda must be Dr. Kent, whose long face, with its pale, almost invisible eyebrows, looked amused by the way Joyce had taken over. She came round the circle of low chairs to Molly, her large hand fingering the row of pens in the pocket of her lab coat, and Joyce rounded on her. “Now we’re all here, w
hat can you tell us?”

  “Not a great deal. I thought I made that clear. Nothing that might influence your dreams.”

  Joyce looked furious at being put in her place by a woman several years younger than herself. ”Will you give us your word that you’ll tell us everything if we agree to continue?”

  “Eventually, when we’ve analyzed the results.”

  “Very well. We put our trust in you.” She was taking her role of spokeswoman rather for granted, Molly thought in the midst of her frustration at trying to remember. “Just so long as you make sure,” Joyce was saying to Dr. Kent, “that people know what we’ve seen before it’s too late.”

  “Famous.” That was Danny, a bullnecked man in his twenties, whose head looked too small for his neck. Perhaps it was the multitude of pimples that stood out against his pasty complexion which made him avoid looking directly at anyone and keep his voice so low that they had heard only the last word. “We’ll be famous,” he said now that everyone was listening.

  “I don’t care if we’re famous or not.” Joyce put on her spectacles to stare at him, her gray eyes glinting in her square face. “We could be useful if only the world would acknowledge it, that’s what matters. That’s what I expect Guilda to achieve.”

  “They must think we’re important,” Danny mumbled, “or they wouldn’t be paying us so much.”

  He couldn’t earn much if he was impressed by the nominal fee they were receiving. He broke the embarrassed silence himself. “It’s funny,” he said, forcing a laugh to prove it, “I used to dream I’d be famous. That shows it works, doesn’t it? That’ll show them. Once I dreamed—”

  Dr. Kent was behind his chair so fast that he shrank away. “Please remember what I said,” she murmured.

  Freda took pity on him. She was a lanky woman in her forties who sat stooped forward as if to hide her tallness. Above her full lips and long nose, her eyes looked wistful. “I know how you feel,” she told him. “Sometimes I wish I could have seen the future. I don’t usually dream ahead, I dream—” She smiled quickly and covered her mouth.

  “Dreaming ahead isn’t what counts,” Joyce said. “It’s preventing what we see that matters.”

  “That’s what I meant I wished.”

  But Joyce had already turned back to Guilda. “Have you any idea how it feels to see these things and not be able to do a blessed thing to change them? It’s worse than being paralyzed, it must be. It’s like being the only one who can see in a world full of blind people. It’s like seeing a child on the edge of a cliff and not being able to do anything because you’re too far away and the people who could save the child can’t see and won’t believe. And not just once, night after night, dream after dream. And every time it’s worse because you know nobody will listen.”

  Danny was gazing at her as if she’d read his thoughts. Certainly she’d given voice to discouragements Molly hadn’t fully realized that she felt herself. That unresolved feeling in her mind was still there, distant and vague. If the others stopped talking she might be able to grasp it, and it seemed important that she should.

  But Helen was trying to speak, a plump young woman perhaps still in her teens, whom Stuart’s gaze kept straying to: long black hair glossy as sealskin, eyes very dark in her pale oval face, curves filling her jeans and t-shirt, and Molly scoffed at herself for suffering a twinge of jealousy, as if Stuart’s opinion mattered. Joyce interrupted before Helen had got out a sentence. “You can tell us this much,” she said to Dr. Kent. “Have any of us had the same dreams?”

  “It’s rather early to say,” Dr. Kent said and smiled at Joyce’s immediate fierce frown, “but there do seem to be suggestive similarities, yes.”

  Perhaps their murmur of triumph drove Stuart away, through a pair of swing doors. Molly had joined in, but she was wondering which of her dreams someone else might have shared: her sailing ship as long as the horizon, her trying to sing “I’m only a cross-eyed octopus” to an auditorium full of priests, her endless clamber up a sloping roof in a blizzard to get to her parents’ bedroom? More likely it had been one of the dreams she had forgotten by now.

  “Some people won’t believe you dream,” dark-eyed Helen said, now that she had the chance. “My husband won’t believe he does. It’s like he won’t admit to that part of himself. It’s very strange.”

  “My Geoffrey has to believe in mine,” Joyce said. “Has to put up with them. Not that he can do anything about them, any more than I could.”

  “David must be wondering how I’m getting on.” Helen sounded as if she hoped he was. “I wish I could call him. I know I can’t,” she said quickly as Dr. Kent made to speak. “He’ll just have to wonder a bit longer. Do him good. Keep him guessing.”

  “I’d like to know how my Geoffrey’s coping. I can’t leave him with a can of beans unless I leave instructions with the opener. Men are such babies, all of them.”

  “I think some people are afraid to think too much about their dreams,” Molly said, changing the subject for Danny’s sake. “I expect they feel they’re at the mercy of their dreams. We all are.” Certainly she felt at the mercy of the one she had forgotten; it made her feel ponderous and prickly and stupid. Just then Stuart wheeled in a trolley laden with food on molded plastic trays.

  So there must be people in the long concrete building who she hadn’t seen, someone to cook and someone to read the scribbling of brain waves, perhaps, unless a computer took care of the latter. Stuart passed out trays and plastic cutlery, lingered beside Helen and then beside Molly.

  Danny was peering suspiciously at his knife as Freda said, “Tell us about yourself, Molly. You haven’t had a chance.”

  “I’m in my last year at university before I go out into the big wide world. I’d like to work in the media. I was working for a magazine when I heard about this.” No need to say it was a sexology magazine, it made her feel so stupid. Concocting readers’ letters had sounded like a fun way for her and Stephanie to spend the vacation, but two weeks of inventing variations had left Molly and her imagination exhausted. The day she’d found herself writing about buttered breadsticks she had known it was time to quit, even if she hadn’t seen the call for subjects for the Foundation for Applied Psychological Research. “I’d like to work somewhere,” she said, suddenly realizing, “that would give us a voice.”

  Joyce was a nurse, Freda worked in a department store in Blackpool, Helen was at library school, Danny was a cinema projectionist and said so resentfully when Helen asked if he was a student too. Molly was surprised how happy she felt just to be with people like herself, people who didn’t regard her as a curiosity or an embarrassment. Her parents had always behaved as if it wasn’t quite nice of her to say that she’d dreamed last night of the morning’s news; even if it were true it was something you didn’t talk about, like her periods, and she had learned not to mention cither as she had ceased to be a child. Since then she’d seldom woken with that sense of having seen a photograph that was waiting to be taken, but perhaps now, as she (bund out about herself-— Now Stuart was stacking the scraped plastic trays and collecting the empty beakers, and all too soon Dr. Kent was saying, “I think it’s time to continue.”

  They were standing up when Joyce demanded, “What was the idea of bringing us all together for tea?”

  “Why, to see if meeting each other affects your dreaming.”

  The others were heading for the bathrooms, Freda stooping a little, Danny brushing back his spiky hair that looked as if he kept losing his temper with it, Stuart watching Helen’s blue-jeaned bottom swaying. Molly glanced back at the circle of empty chairs, and suddenly she felt as if she’d dreamed the meeting. Had the photograph been taken without her noticing, or had it yet to be? For a moment she felt breathlessly apprehensive. She couldn’t tell Dr. Kent, for it was too late for her to know if she’d had the dream or was just imagining that she had. She trudged away to the bathrooms, to her room, back to bed.

  She filled her tumbler with water from th
e jug on the bedside table and lay down, gazing at the microphone. Dr. Kent’s last words were troubling her somehow, mixed up with the dream she didn’t know if she had had and the distant frustration that had seemed, for a moment when Dr. Kent had finished speaking, close enough to grasp. There was no point in saying any of this to the microphone when it might not be switched on, but perhaps she could tell Stuart when he reached her on his rounds.

  The thought of how he would react kept her quiet as he taped the wires to her skull. Damn his skepticism, he was here to listen. He was tucking in the sheet now, and she felt his hand under her breast through the mattress, as if he wore a huge clumsy glove. “Anything else I can do?” he said.

  “You’ll be lucky.” He reminded her of the obscure contempt the sexology editor felt for his readers.

  “Be like that, then.” He sounded offended. He gave her and the room a curt glance from the doorway before he closed the door.

  She dragged her paperback War and Peace off the bedside table and tried to read. She didn’t feel like closing her eyes just yet. If the idea of dreaming had begun to make her uneasy, that was information too. Perhaps it was rather the thought of having to wake up at the end of every dream that was troubling her; she knew by now that she would. Soon all this would be over and she could write about it. Perhaps that might even help her get a job.

  She took out her tasseled bookmark that was cracking the fat spine. “What did I come here for?” Rostov was wondering. “Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? When will all this end?” Not for another thousand pages at least, and the prospect made her eyelids droop. She closed the book on her finger so that she wouldn’t be tempted to give up entirely, and let her eyes close.

  She felt Tolstoy settle beside her. She felt warm and safe, no longer troubled by frustration. Sleep must be the answer, and she hadn’t realized how much she needed it. Fish never sleep, she thought, sharks never dream, and wondered what these dreamy thoughts looked like as they swarmed along the wires, spiders of the mind, swarming out of the other rooms to their lair. Was anyone dreaming yet? What did Freda dream? It frustrated Molly not to know, but now she was drifting again, Little Nemo piloting the Nautilus deeper and deeper through the chambers of the subconscious but nobody was at the controls … little nobody … nobody in the passenger area with its pale green walls and its low chairs on the island of carpet … except that now something was: a circle of seated figures that were altogether too pink, that were turning their blank heads to her. She jerked awake and muttered a description to the microphone, though she wasn’t sure where her sleepy thoughts had turned into a dream. Usually she liked this state, the stream of thoughts and obscure correlations that reminded her of the pages she’d read of a digest of Finnegans Wake, but now it felt uncontrollable, sweeping her toward the precipice of dreams. There was nothing to fear, everyone dreamed, but why did they? Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head whenever I feel afraid I hold my head whenever I feel afraid, over and over an’ dover Andover, an Iron Age settlement near London, but she wasn’t sitting a history examination now, she was back in the sexology office and faking letters as fast as she could, for Danny Swain in stained trousers to collect. That woke her momentarily, wondering why she should have thought that was his name, but now she was in a lecture hall where Joyce was haranguing the audience while Dr. Kent heckled, shouting, “A blind man needs no crutch.” That seemed profoundly meaningful as Molly woke; she would have told the microphone except that she was sinking again into the dark, which seemed impatient now. It was all right, she had the microphone, she could keep in touch as she ventured into the dark.